Category: Previews (Page 8 of 19)

The Repo Men Are Coming: Do You Have What It Takes to Disappear?

February 4, 2010 / Michael Andersen

repomen Last fall, Lone Shark Games and Wired Magazine conducted a month-long, nationwide manhunt for reporter Evan Ratliff, with $5,000 on the line. After 25 days on the run, Ratliff’s love of gluten-free pizza spelled his downfall when the owner of Naked Pizza caught him in New Orleans. This time, it’s your turn. Lone Shark Games, in conjunction with Wired Magazine and Universal Pictures, are searching for a few good men (and women) adventurous enough to put their regular lives on hold for a month, starting in late February. Selected “Runners” will be provided vital technology along with seed money to escape detection for a month. Every Runner to make itÂ a month without gettingÂ caught receives a $7,500Â reward. But, as the contest notes, “people will be trying to find you, and they’ll use any means allowed in the rules to try to figure out where you are.”

ThisÂ companion pieceÂ to The HuntÂ for Evan RatliffÂ serves as a promotion for the upcoming Universal Pictures film Repo Men. In the film, Union employees Remy and Jake (Jude Law and Forest Whitaker) repossess artificial organs from their recipients after a period of nonpayment. Thus, taken in context, the Runners are in for the flight of their lives. Of course, Lone Shark Games President Mike Selinker assured me that Runners who are caught should not have worry about the Union harvesting their organs…for all definitions of “organ harvesting” that you or I would know about.
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DARPA Network Challenge: Celebrating 40 Years of Internet

November 2, 2009 / Michael Andersen

darpa_challenge On October 29, 1969 at 10:30PM, UCLA student Charley Kline sent the letters “LO” from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park using the ARPANET. Forty years later, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is celebrating the birth of the Internet with a contest that tests its capabilities to bring people together. At 10AM EST on December 5, ten moored red weather balloons will be released across the continental United States for six hours: the first person to submit the latitudes and longitudes of all ten balloons in degree-minute-second (DDD-MM-SS) format will win $40,000. Balloons will be accompanied by DARPA representatives at readily accessible locations visible from nearby roadways.

The DARPA Network Challenge opens for registration on December 1, and will accept submissions until December 14. The Secretary of Defense is authorized to award prizes under 10 U.S.C. Â§ 2374a for “outstanding achievements in basic, advanced, and applied research, technology development, and prototype development that have the potential for application to the performance of the military missions of the Department of Defense.” To achieve this end, DARPA notes in its contest rules that it “may contact individuals to discuss the means and methods used in solving the challenge.”

The Rules state that DARPA will only issue a single check to the winning individual registered on the event website. Thus, successful entrants will have to find an optimal incentive structure to receive timely and accurate data from the crowd. Even assuming the balloons will be visible from Interstate highways, combing almost 47,000 miles of roadways in six hours will be a daunting task. Verifying that data will be equally difficult, especially if people refuse to share their successes and failures or post falsified sightings.

Games like Vanishing Point and Perplex City have previously tackled the challenge of crowd-sourcing tasks that involve a financial reward to a single individual. Therefore, it’s somewhat fitting that Perplex City developer Adrian Hon has provided an in-depth analysis of the challenges this contest’s winner must overcome. Adrian notes that he is planning on running a similar challenge in London with Philip Trippenbach before Christmas.

Click Here to visit DARPA’s Network Challenge contest page.
Click Here for a partial list of groups participating in the DARPA Challenge.

Pixel Pitch Award Helps Desedo Turn “Heart of the City” Daydream Into Reality

October 17, 2009 / Michael Andersen

pixelpitch Power to the Pixel’s Cross-Media Film Forum at The Times BFI London Film Festival has come to a close. Capping off the event, Power to the Pixel announced that Desedo Films won the 2009 Babelgum Pixel Pitch Award for their project Heart of the City, taking home a Â£6,000 prize to turn their pitch into a reality.

Power to the Pixel received 120 submissions from 14 countries for the Pixel Pitch competition. Seven teams from production companies hailing from France, the UK, and the United StatesÂ were invited to present in London during the festival. In the end, Desedo’s project came on top, with the evocative tagline, “What if Kanye West Met Lord of the Rings?“

Heart of the City was pitched as a “quest narrative set in the world of urban teens: a web series, an ARG, comics, products and a feature film.” The story revolves around two New York City teens who discover a talisman that enables them to transform their daydreams into reality. Over the course of the story, they explore the talisman’s secrets “between skateboarding, romance, and momma jokes.”

PICNIC ’09: A Preview

September 22, 2009 / DaniÃ«l van Gool

PICNIC 2009 Wednesday September 23^rd is a day a lot of people in the creative industry have been looking forward to, as tomorrow the fourth installment of PICNIC will kick off in sunny Amsterdam.Â Previous incarnations of this intangibly sparkly conference were self-defined as a â€œcrossmedia conferenceâ€ but this year, the organization of PICNIC didnâ€™t even try to put a tagline on the event.

And I can understand why they didnâ€™t: itâ€™s hard enough to describe what PICNIC is really about, let alone catch its essence in a one-liner. The past three installments were a melting pot of creativity, attended by major and minor names from everywhere in media, art , the digital world and several other industries.

Iâ€™m really looking forward to attending again this year and reporting on the event for ARGNet. I just received notice from the people at PICNIC that the conference event is completely sold out, and the lineup of speakers is probably one of the reasons for that. I wanted to give you a short preview ofÂ things Iâ€™m looking forward to at PICNIC this year:

Riese the Series: Delivering Transmedia with a Side of Steampunk

September 17, 2009 / Michael Andersen

Riese1 The dystopian kingdom of Eleysia has its priorities in order: rather than developing automobiles, telecommunications technology, or a democratic political structure, its citizens have perfected the use of tinted goggles as a fashion accessory. Starting later this week, members of an Eleysian religious cult known as The Sect will start proselytizing their ways to our world. You can already view some of their highly stylized promotional materials at their website, TheSectIsHere.com. This alternate reality game serves an introduction to the transmedia world of Riese, an upcoming web-series scheduled to premiere early this November.

In The Sect Is Here, members of the enigmatic religious cult from the Riese universe have managed to reach our reality, along with a lone renegade seeking to stop them. Through both online and location-specific puzzles, players will have the opportunity to unravel the mysteries surrounding The Sect’s real intentions, in both our world and Eleysia. The alternate reality game will extend past the web-series’ November premiere, and will enter a media mix intended to include print, web, mobile, and television.

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Halo ODST: Discovering Sadie’s Story

September 15, 2009 / Geoff May

“Prepare To Drop”
Those words have been resounding through the gaming community for months, and the clashing drums of excited gamers are growing as the release date for Halo 3: ODST draws nearer. But there’s something more in this video game release that’s attracting attention.

Back in 2004, an ARG milestone was achieved with the launch of a defining marketing campaign for the genre. Before Halo 2 was released, a mysterious URL appeared momentarily in a promotional trailer, leading the way to the discovery of another world, another story within the Halo universe. The campaign became known as “I Love Bees“. That campaign is what introduced me to the world of ARGs. Already being an enormous Halo fan, the combination of the Halo science fiction universe with this method of story-telling had me immediately hooked.

Chrysopteron / Superintendent With each iteration of the Halo video game franchise, there has been some form of extended experience, viral campaign, or ARG. For Halo 3 it was Iris. Bungie even produced their own relatively localized mysteries, such as the Cortana Letters leading up to Halo: Combat Evolved, and other strange A.I. users posting and interacting on the Bungie.net forums like The Smuggler and The Superintendent. Bungie had created a diverse, dynamic, and vast universe in which many stories could be told beyond the video game genre.

Sure enough, Halo 3: ODST will have a unique extended experience of its own. Or rather, an embedded tangential experience, for lack of a better term. Within the game, players will be able to uncover bits and pieces of a separate story arc throughout the campaign. This story is being called “Sadie’s Story“. Created by Fourth Wall Studios in partnership with Bungie Studios‘ Joe Staten and Ashley Wood, it’s an audio drama (not unlike the radio drama revealed in I Love Bees) that utilizes comic-book style story-telling and will reveal an exciting mystery throughout the campaign, told from the perspective of Sadie- a New Mombasa civilian, and her experience through the ordeal leading up to New Mombasa’s destruction. It’s reported to contain even more voice acting than ODST itself.